NATURAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE, 1700-1800 321 



cotton field, the cotton "gin" (engine), was invented (by Eli 

 Whitney of Connecticut) to replace the slow and tedious process 

 of separating the cotton fibre or staple from its seed hitherto 

 laboriously done by hand. Applied chemistry also began to 

 appear, e.g. in the manufacture of illuminating gas by Murdoch 

 at Salford, England, in 1792, while the discoveries of Galvani and 

 Volta at the very end of the century opened up that new era 

 of electricity in the midst of which we dwell to-day. 



THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE UPON THE SPIRIT OF THE EIGH- 

 TEENTH CENTURY. Writers on the literature of the eighteenth 

 century, after condemning it because of its comparative barrenness 

 in great works of art or literature, are apt to find the reason in one 

 or another aspect of the growth of science. Professor Dowden, for 

 example, in his essay on Goethe, remarks that 



Rousseau's emancipation of the heart, was felt in the eighteenth 

 century to be a blessed deliverance from the eager, yet too arid, 

 speculation of the age, 



although he admits that : 



Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost its title-deeds, and the task 

 of the eighteenth century was to recover them. 



Dowden's unusually charitable judgment of the century is more 

 or less typical of literary opinion generally. 



For the scientist, on the other hand, few centuries in all history 

 are more important, for the eighteenth was not only rich in scien- 

 tific performance but still more pregnant with promise. And 

 even in art if in that term music be included and literature, 

 a century which produced a Haydn, a Mozart and a Beethoven, 

 with a Burns, a Voltaire, a Wordsworth and a Goethe, need not 

 fear to hold up its head. 



We have mentioned above the first School of Mines : viz. that 

 at Freiberg, in Saxony (1765). The first School of Civil Engineer- 

 ing was established in Paris (1747). In this century also were 

 established new universities, e.g., Yale (1701), Gottingen (1737), 

 Princeton (1746), Bonn (1777) and Brussels (1781). 



